Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Gauging what good manners mean in a foreign city is always a tricky
business. Personally my travels around Europe have been a long trail of
social faux pas. I’ve been scowled at for using the informal ”tu” to an
older Parisian woman I asked directions from, laughed at for carrying a
24-roll pack of toilet paper on Milan’s metro (I still don’t get what
was wrong with this), and raised eyebrows by absent-mindedly addressing a
ticket inspector on a Krakow tram as “Mummy.”

These sorts of gaffes seem to be amplified on public transit. Push
your way onto a subway train in Copenhagen and you blend in – according
to Danish friends it’s the one place in Denmark where mild social
aggression is tolerated. Try the same thing in Glasgow and … well, just
try it and see. In London, dumped newspapers on trains are a form of
courtesy. In Vienna, they are treated like something dead that the cat’s
dragged in.

In other words, it always helps to know the local rules. Talking to
friends around Europe, I’ve compiled this summer travel season guide of
specifically local subway do’s and don’ts in some of the continent’s
major capitals.

London

Manners on London’s Tube system are a typically British brew of
tension, tolerance and passive aggression. In some ways, rules can be
surprisingly lax. You can eat food, even stinky food, without being
reprimanded, though if you’re a woman you risk being shamed for it
on social media. Drinking alcohol has fairly recently been banned, but
it used to be the accepted rule on weekend nights (as these 1980s photos
show). As for littering with newspapers, it’s actually considered
polite to dump reading matter for other passengers to pick up, even
though it leaves cars looking like a junkyard.

Admittedly, the Tube is a free-for-all tidiness-wise not because
people don’t mind, though it’s true that British people's general
messiness shocks many visitors from Southern Europe. It’s more that,
thanks to a combination of fear and inhibition, Londoners generally
prefer to tut inwardly than actually speak up. They’re not entirely
wrong – there are a enough British people out there who can go from mute
to berserk in 60 seconds.

This inhibition evaporates immediately, however, when it comes to the
London Tube’s cardinal sin: standing on the wrong side of the
escalator. In London, time is short and escalators are long. If you are a
clueless visitor standing on the wrong side of one, rest assured that
the people who don’t actually barge past you are probably mentally
running you through with a samurai sword. And when I say “people,” I
mean me.

Berlin

In the German capital, subway rules are the opposite of London’s.
Riders tend to be freaked out by untidiness or disorder, but they aren’t
in as much of a hurry. Leave a paper behind on the seat, and you’ll
often get barked at – I’ve been snapped at for leaving papers I’d never
even touched. Eating food is also a no-no, which is fair enough. If you
break the rules, don’t be surprised if Berliners are vocal about it.
This is partly because low-level grumpiness is more socially acceptable
in Berlin but mainly because, with a moderate crime rate, people just
aren’t as scared as each of other there.

But if Berliners are uptight about space, they’re more relaxed about
time. Even when they have your coins, Berlin subway ticket machines
pause and have a little think before they deign to print your ticket.
Berliners stand wherever they want on their (short) escalators – if
anything, it’s the people who try to hustle past who are seen as the
rude ones. Being in a hurry simply doesn’t give you a free pass for bad
behavior here – you can be reprimanded by a station guard for holding
open a closing door. That guard would be right, however. Trains wait a
decent amount of time in stations and announce clearly when you should
get on (“einsteigen”) and stay back (“zurückbleiben”), so there’s really no excuse.

Paris

If jamming the doors is taboo in Berlin, in Paris it’s mandatory.
Metro doors stay open so briefly before they buzz and slam that it can
be nigh impossible for a crowd to get on without someone using a foot as
a wedge. This extremely short board time could explain the air of
persecution on Paris’ metro: you feel as if the entire system is
hectoring you, basically because it is. At the same time, it gives you a
chance to show good manners. While officialdom strongly discourages it,
it’s considered polite in Paris to hold the doors so everyone behind
you has time to jump on too. Fail to do so, and you may pull out of the
station watching someone’s shaking fist fade into the distance.

Where the Paris Metro shows its more laid-back side is with body
contact. French people require a far smaller bubble of personal space
than Americans, and it’s considered perfectly normal in Paris to have
legs matched hip to ankle with your neighbor – with limited room,
there’s not much choice. This is also why people generally avoid eye
contact and chatting with strangers. They’re trying to make up for a
surfeit of physical intimacy by counterbalancing with a deficit
elsewhere. Paris also has its own vital locals-only rule. Metro trains
have flip-down jump seats by the doors – these should always be emptied
and flipped up when the train is busy. Fail to do this, as shown in this
Paris Metro poster
encouraging courtesy, and you’ll find yourself staring at a resentful
crowd, or at least their crotches. To be fair to Parisians, the city has
made some real attempts to improve its poor reputation for manners on
the metro, whether it’s high-profile campaigns like this one or etiquette manuals that state what should be obvious.

Rome

To a northern European like myself, the Roman metro seems to be a
place of no taboo. In London’s rush hour, subway riders stand crushed
together in silence. In Rome, they stand crushed together talking at the
top of their voices. No one does hushed whispers here, which could
explain why no one feels the need to pretend they’re not eavesdropping
on each other’s conversations. If it’s considered rude to push onto a
Roman metro train before all passengers have alighted, then it’s a
rudeness so widely tolerated as to be almost ubiquitous. Getting off a
car can be a struggle: so great can be the press of people who can’t be
bothered to let you off before they get on. Escalators, meanwhile are
stately and almost exclusively for standing on. This might all sound
like hell, but Italians sometimes feel the same about London’s Tube,
wondering what intense psychic pressure must be in place to enforce all
that queuing, shuffling and silence.

There’s one area where Rome leaves a lot to be desired. According to
an Italian friend, there’s an unfortunately high instance of men who
can’t keep themselves to themselves at rush hour. Her way of dealing
with it is to grab any roving hands and ask loudly “Has anyone lost this? I found it on my…[insert name of relevant body part here].” Apparently, it works.

Athens

Are you worried about the younger generation’s lack of manners? Then
take a ride on the Athens Metro and have your assumptions shaken. In
Greece’s capital, it’s younger riders who are generally the more patient
and well behaved. Find yourself jostled while getting on a train or
notice someone pushing in front of you at a ticket office, and the
likelihood is that your antagonists hair will be salt and pepper at
least. So why are older Athenians pushier? A possible explanation is
that, in a country that became overwhelmingly urban only after World War
II, an etiquette system designed for making metropolitan living
smoother took a generation or two to develop.

Beyond the odd jostling granddad, don’t expect Athens Metro to be a
free-for-all. Sure, it has the usual stand-where-you-like escalators and
occasional gauntlet of boarding passengers who don’t want to let you
off first, but the metro’s newness (most of it was completed in 2000)
and preponderance of well-mopped marble somehow helps keeps people
reined in. In fact, it’s practically the only place in the city where
the smoking ban is actually obeyed (including Greece’s parliament).

It does have one unusual feature, however: a far bigger than average
overlap between people going to work and those coming home from a night
out. While Greeks work long hours (more per week
than anyone else in Europe) they also go out far later – A
nightlife-loving Athenian friend of mine almost had his teenage social
life ruined by a tough 4 AM curfew. In northern European cities, this
might mean hardworking people being exposed to a leery crowd of drunken
idiots (confession: I have probably been that idiot), but Greeks aren’t
the world’s heaviest drinkers and, like I say, young Athenians are a
relatively well-behaved lot. With the economic crisis pushing taxis out
of more people’s reach, this trend has only got stronger.